A day to honor mothers who have passed on

Published 12:00 am, Saturday, May 8, 2010

A North Side Corpus Christi cemetery was part of my childhood the way a playground might be for other children. My parents went there what seemed like every weekend.

Our complement of tools was purposeful: a shovel, maybe a pitchfork or hoe and a couple of spades, a bucket and some flowers — usually plastic ones in gaudy colors (they tolerated the South Texas sun better) or sometimes coffee cans full of fresh-cut roses from the garden.

I never asked my mother why we went to the cemetery so frequently. Her devotion to her mother was unmistakable in the sweat that poured from her brow while she tilled the soil around my grandmother's grave. Mother's Day was an exceptional visit. There were so many flowers, the trunk of my father's Chevy sedan resembled a garden. And I remember a joy like any grandchild might feel to visit a beloved grandmother, but a palpable sadness, too, seeing my mother's grief for her mother open anew.

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It was these memories that drew me Friday morning to San Fernando Cemetery No. 2. The Southwest Side grounds were teeming with activity ahead of Mother's Day weekend, which draws the cemetery's second-biggest volume of visitors. (Día de los Muertos in November brings the largest crowd.)

Academics might explain the reverence for los muertitos as a phenomenon rooted in Mexican culture. For me, it was just a way of life — much as it is for Blanche DeLeon.

Before the sun began to heat up the day, DeLeon already had spread three bags of potting soil and planted three patches of St. Augustine sod on her maternal grandmother's grave that's shared with DeLeon's nephew. She sat casually at the head of the grave, one leg folded under her as she planted Indian paintbrush at the top edge of the flat, red-granite headstone. Dressed in an old T-shirt and shorts, sporting a red cap, DeLeon clearly was a pro.

She'd tidied up her mother's grave earlier in the week, also spreading potting soil and planting six patches of sod. A metal stand with a heart-shaped flower wreath stood at the grave's head, an acrylic frame encasing a photo of her mother in one of her favorite places — near the beach in Corpus Christi. Roses adorn either side of the upright gray-granite headstone. DeLeon, an AT&T retiree, planned to be at the cemetery another two or three hours watering the new sod at both graves. She brought her own hose.

“I talk to her,” DeLeon said of her mother, Lidia Valdez Leal, who died of ovarian cancer four years ago. “I find a lot of comfort in coming to see my mom.” Before leaving her mother's graveside, DeLeon says she'll petition her mother: “Cuídanos como siempre.” Keep watch over us as you always have.

Sunday morning, as they have since their mother's death, DeLeon will gather at thecamposanto with her seven siblings and their families for about an hour to reflect on their mother's meaning in their lives. A single parent, Leal raised eight children by herself in San Antonio's Beacon Hill neighborhood. All earned college degrees.

“She was the backbone of our family,” DeLeon said.

Honoring that memory in a cemetery on Mother's Day, then, seems a perfectly normal thing to do.